Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 52:207 (Jul 1895)
Article: The Passing Of Agnosticism
Author: A. A. Berle

BSac 52:207 (July 1895) p. 505

The Passing Of Agnosticism

Rev. A. A. Berle

“Beautiful without doubt is the world, excelling, as well in its magnitude as in the arrangement of its parts, both those in the oblique circle and those about the north, and also in its spherical form. Yet it is not this, but its Artificer that we must worship. For when any of your subjects come to you, they do not neglect to pay their homage to you, their rulers and lords, from whom they will obtain whatever they need, and address themselves to the magnificence of your palace; but, if they chance to come upon the royal residence, they bestow a passing glance of admiration on its beautiful structure; but it is to you yourselves that they show honor, as being ‘all in all.’ You sovereigns, indeed, rear and adorn your palaces for yourselves; but the world was not created because God needed it; for God is Himself everything to Himself,—light unapproachable, a perfect world, spirit, power, reason. If, therefore, the world is an instrument in tune, and moving in well-measured time, I adore the Being who gave its harmony, and strikes its notes and sings the accordant strain, and not the instrument.”

So wrote Athenagoras, the Athenian Christian and philosopher in the second century after Christ,—a splendid pre-figuration of the type of thought which centuries after should produce when the marvels of the wonderful creation of God should have ceased to dazzle the mind of man for themselves alone, but also, and more, for their Creator and Governor, in fact the transition from the rule of world worship to the wor-

BSac 52:207 (July 1895) p. 506

ship of Almighty God. Even in that early period the inadequacy of the Greek mode of thought was perceived and felt, and the search for that larger view of the world, wherein its true relation to the universe and to God should be more justly and fully expressed, was begun. The passionate admiration which was in its essence the Greek substitute for worship, by which the enamoured minds of the Greeks revelled in the beautiful forms and entrancing images which a highly cultivated aesthetic sense and a highly developed artistic energy produced, did not still the feeling after the God who made these aspirations and confirmed the permanent power of the beautiful in human life and experience. From the beauty of form and color to the beauty of thought and the pleasurable in sense was but a natural and onward development. But when the step from beauty of feeling and thought to beauty in life and service needed to be made, the impulsive force of the aesthetic idea spent itself, and failed to meet the ethical and spiritual necessities which the very worship of the beautiful had created. And thus the Athenian must ever be seeking to hear some new thing, and to erect al...